Day: October 19, 2015

The notification process for tonight’s “Pier 55 Inc.” meeting could certainly be improved. There is no information on the Hudson River Park website, nor their Twitter, and Pier 55 itself does not have a web site (that I could locate) so it is unclear how meeting information has been reaching “the community” – other than the item I saw (below) in the current Villager. Maybe there are signs near the water? Has anyone seen one?

Return to ‘Diller Island’:

A community meeting about the planned Pier55 project in Hudson River Park will be held Mon., Oct. 19, at 6:30 p.m., at the Clinton School for Artists and Writers gym, 10 E. 15th St. The meeting, which is open to the public, is being hosted by Pier55, Inc., the nonprofit group that plans to oversee programming for the new pier. According to the organizers: “The community meeting will be a roundtable discussion with folks from the Pier55 team, focusing on the future of local arts and educational programming at the new park. Community attendees will have the opportunity to share their ideas for the kinds of local arts, educational and community programming they would like to see at Pier55.”

It feels like a token reaching out to “community attendees” — and a little too late after neighbors and other interested parties had been excluded from the actual planning, creation and formation of this entity – only alerted to any information about it once it was a done deal. (Sound familiar?) The private planners have been forced into “discussion” due to public opposition and concerns.

And really – “folks from the Pier55 team” – ? That sounds like trying way too hard.

The Barry Diller & Co. Pier 55 project is still being fought, by the way, in the courts which the New York Post is very upset about calling the lawsuit “elitist” – which is funny. Isn’t it the other way around? Isn’t the entire history of this project “elitist?”

The whole corporate nature of the Hudson River Park irks me. I remember how it was when it was a little rough-around-the-edges, fondly.

Categories

Categories

For my Activist Friends

Realize that little things lead to bigger things ... And there's a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don't grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don't grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you've done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of.
~ Pete Seeger